SURVIVAL ODYSSEY
Beach green salads and blueberry desserts made tasty side dishes, but to truly feed ourselves we needed fish. While I was an experienced kayaker, I was a novice angler.
One afternoon just before high tide, Fredrik and I noticed the shiny, round head and huge, dark eyes of a harbor seal bobbing at the mouth of a river.
Like us, it had come to fish. I trundled over to the
river’s edge in my rain gear and immediately found myself fighting a thrashing five-pound salmon. My reel was set up right-handed; I am a lefty. I watched in horror as the line flew off the reel and tangled into an indecipherable mess. Unwilling to let my dinner get away, I grabbed the thin monofilament with my bare hands and dragged my squirming prize onto shore, where I full-body tackled it. Looking up from the wet grass to make sure my husband had registered my accomplishment, I noticed he had a fish on as well. He was expertly playing it with his fishing rod in hand. We were suddenly, unbelievably rich.
In the Alaskan salmon hierarchy, pinks are near the bottom, outranked by the bright red meat of sockeye salmon and the gigantic size of king salmon, not to mention the hard-fighting, late season silver, which we hoped would arrive soon. While many Alaskan salmon snobs won’t bother fishing for pinks, a freshly caught pink salmon cooked just right makes a delicious meal.
Fredrik’s small, portable fish smoker was the same kind his family used to preserve lake trout caught at their cabin in northern Sweden. Some of our freshly caught fish we would eat hot smoked for dinner that night. The rest we would cold smoke—an overnight soak in a salt, sugar and soy sauce brine, and then a slow, cool smoke over alder chips resulting in a salty, smoky treat that keeps for days.
That evening, as a drowning rain beat loudly on our tarp, we delighted in a dinner of alder-smoked salmon and a salad of oyster leaf, beach lovage, beach greens and wild peas, with blueberries for dessert. Afterwards we leisurely sipped spruce tip tea.
With each successful meal, my fledgling confidence in our ability to live comfortably on the coast was growing. I took pleasure in learning about an aspect of this country I had never explored before. With every bite, this place became more a part of me.
DIGITAL EXTRA: Get delicious Alaskan wild edibles recipes at
Rapidmedia.com/0423.
46 PADDLING MAGAZINE This article first appeared in the 2015 Summer/Fall issue of Adventure Kayak.
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